PKI Interoperability Gateway for Digital Certificate Management
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Solution Overview
Problem
Current PKI systems lack interoperability between different Certificate Authorities (CAs), requiring companies to use multiple CAs with varying infrastructures and protocols, which hinders seamless communication and innovation in PKI protocols.
Innovation Solution
A centralized system acts as an intermediary between companies and multiple CAs, allowing for single conduit digital certificate issuance and lifecycle management, converting requests between client-specific and CA-specific formats using an identity management server that selects the appropriate CA based on criteria like location, cost, and trust level, ensuring secure communication.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Adaptability or versatility
If companies use multiple different CAs with their own infrastructures and protocols, then each CA can provide specialized PKI services, but interoperability between PKI networks is hindered and system complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces a gateway as an intermediary component that mediates between clients using different PKI protocols and the various CAs. The gateway translates and adapts communication between incompatible protocols, enabling interoperability without requiring companies to directly manage multiple CA infrastructures. This resolves the contradiction by providing protocol adaptation capabilities while maintaining a simplified client-side interface.
Solution Approach 2:
The gateway is designed with multi-functional capabilities to handle multiple PKI protocols and communicate with various CAs through a single unified interface. This universal design allows the system to support diverse PKI services from different CAs while presenting a consistent interface to clients, thereby reducing the effective complexity experienced by users while maintaining adaptability to different protocols.
2Device complexity
If a generic PKI protocol is adopted for all clients, then interoperability is improved, but incentives for protocol advancement are reduced and flexibility is limited
Solution Approach 1:
The gateway implements dynamic protocol adaptation capabilities that can adjust to different PKI protocols based on the specific CA being accessed. Rather than using a static generic protocol, the gateway dynamically selects and adapts to the appropriate protocol for each interaction, maintaining simplicity for clients while preserving the ability to work with evolving CA-specific protocols and future advancements.
3Ease of operation
If manual intervention is required for certificate management, then flexibility in handling complex cases is maintained, but time consumption and operational complexity increase
Solution Approach 1:
The system implements automated certificate issuance and lifecycle management through the gateway, which can autonomously handle certificate requests, validations, and management operations with CAs. This self-service capability eliminates the need for manual intervention in routine certificate operations, significantly reducing time consumption and operational complexity while maintaining the ability to handle complex cases through the gateway's adaptive protocols.
Data Source
AI summary
A system for providing interoperability between PKI networks is provided in which a identity management server converts PKI requests received in a client-specific format into a generic format, identifies an appropriate certificate authority for handling the request, converts the request into a format specific to the format used by the identified certificate authority, and forwards the request to the identified certificate authority for processing.